It's official.

After an amazing first collaboration with my friends at Jackson Fish Market, What A Lovely Name has launched.

Thanks to...
  • Jenny - what an amazing designer. It was an honor just to be able to set her graphics as div backgrounds.
  • Walter - in a word, brilliant. Turned hours of hacking into moments of enlightenment. He's made me a better [ruby|javascript|css|*nix] hacker and a better engineer.
  • Hillel convinced me to leave a comfortable job at an insurance company and start my own gig--with a story about half-priced pots. I'm not kidding. I'm not sure I would have done it without his encouragement--or prodding. Looking back over what I've done and what I've learned over the last 4+ months, I couldn't be more grateful.
Also thanks to...
  • MacBook Pro for being an amazing piece of hardware, even if it's not the new one.
  • Ruby and Ruby on Rails for challenging my sole devotion to statically typed and compiled languages
  • APIDock for being a great Rails reference.
  • Haml and Sass for making HTML and CSS fun
  • Prototype and script.aculo.us for some amazing Javascript tools
  • ImageMagick for server-side dynamic image generation
  • ssh - I now know how people on Unix get things done
  • git (and for a while Subversion) for version control.
  • pngcrush for making small pngs
  • Capistrano for making deployment easy
  • Mac Ports for making it scary easy to install unix tricks on a mac
  • Firebug for debugging everything. Amazing.
  • Firebox for having an extensibility story that supports things like Firebug
  • Safari for being more stable and more standards-compliant than Firefox a lot of the time
  • VMWare for letting me test IE7 compat without a Windows box
  • IE8 for emulating IE7 so nicely with something approaching reasonable dev tools
  • SliceHost for, well, hosting
  • TextMate for being an amazing editor
  • Skype and Adium for helping me stay in touch
  • Online Coffee Company for keeping me caffeinated
It's been a great ride. Can't wait for the next project.